Istio: an Open Source Microservices Platform from IBM, Google, and Lyft

by Ben Pearson

June 1st, 2017

IBM, Google, and Lyft have worked together to produce Istio, an open source microservices platform built for developers. The release of this project is part of an effort from these three companies to develop better software to connect, secure, manage, and monitor microservices platforms between platforms, sources, and vendors.

From the announcement:

We continue to see an increasing number of developers turning to microservices when building their applications. This strategy allows developers to decompose a large application into smaller, more manageable pieces. Although decomposing big applications into smaller pieces is a practice we’ve seen in the field for as long as software has been written, the microservices approach is particularly well suited to developing large scale, continuously available software in the cloud.

Istio is built on three primary components:

Amalgam8 – IBM built this unified service mesh with a control plan to improve A/B testing, canary releases, and to test systems against failures.

Service Control – Google built this control plane that focuses on enforcing policies like authentication, rate limits, and ACL’s.

Envoy – Lyft built this proxy to transform their monolithic production system into more than 10,000 VM’s that handle over a hundred microservices.